In episode #127 of the Joy Joya Jewelry Marketing Podcast, I share some of my favorite tips for growing your jewelry brand’s email list. If you’re struggling to gain new subscribers for your email marketing efforts, then you’ll definitely want to listen and watch for tips that you can implement today. Find the transcript for the episode below.

Laryssa Wirstiuk
I want to talk today about tactics for getting subscribers to your email list. This is something that a lot of people I consult with struggle with, they’re always looking for new ways to attract people to their email list because as we learned a few minutes ago, email marketing is a top driver of sales revenue. So I have a lot of tips. In this episode, I would say if you are not trying some of them yet to try as many as you possibly can. Because all of these things working together will ultimately help you grow your email list, maybe doing one or two here and there and you might see some movement, but I would really love to see you max out all your options, so that you can get the best results possible.

So the most obvious way to grow your email list is to ensure that you have some kind of pop up or opt in form on your website. I’m sure that a lot of my listeners already have this. But if not, it’s an easy thing that you can implement today. So in addition to just having that pop up or opt in form in the footer, or somewhere else on your website, you really want to make sure that the call to action is strong, clear and specific. So tell your future subscribers, specifically what they’re getting by opting into your emails, whether that’s announcements about upcoming promotions, news about new products, will they be the first to hear about these things, you want to treat your email list as a VIP list, you want those people to really feel like they’re opting into something special that they wouldn’t get otherwise. So whatever that might be, you want to make it super clear upfront, because otherwise what is what is the point? What is the incentive, and if possible, or if it makes sense for your brand, because of course you don’t want to train your customers to expect discounts all the time, you may want to offer some kind of incentive to get people to sign up, whether that’s free shipping, 10% off 15% off some kind of gift with purchase, whatever that may be, you’ll need to figure that out specifically for your business. But it’s a way to encourage people to sign up. And it’s so expected these days like customers who are on the fence about buying something or potentially interested in buying something they look for that email offer because if they’re a first time customer, they want to make sure that they’re getting any sort of discount possible. So that is the most obvious way to get subscribers for your email list.

Another tactic and you should be doing this anyway is to create truly amazing email content. You want to be thinking outside of the box. If you can’t do it yourself, hire a graphic designer hire an email marketing’s strategic is someone who can really help you take your emails from blah to Wow, you want to create emails that are so great that people who are already subscribed to them feel inspired to share them with their friends. And that can mean has an amazing design, you have some kind of amazing offer, you’re really showing your products in a beautiful way. Whatever it is, it has to be exciting enough to get your current subscribers to stop and say, This is so cool. Like I want to share this with my best friend, I want to share this with my mom. If you can encourage people to share your emails, to forward them to whatever it may be share, you can potentially get new subscribers that way because word of mouth will help other people subscribe. So that’s another thing that you should be doing anyway, think about how you can create amazing email content. You can think about sharing the direct link to sign up to your emails in your Instagram bio. And then mention in your captions for your social media posts. Occasionally, not all the time what someone might gain by signing up, whether it’s a coupon code or what other whatever other incentive you’re providing. If you don’t want to necessarily substitute out that link in your bio for just the email signup link, you can use a link service like link tree, for example, which is a free service that allows you to put a shortened link in your bio, when a person clicks it, it actually opens a page that has a lot of links on it. So you can link to your shop, you can link to your email signup, you can link to maybe info about events, something like that. So that’s definitely an option. You want to make the most of that space and also attract people that are following you on Instagram, but maybe aren’t on your email list. I definitely suggest if you can manage this and implement it. And there are definitely Shopify apps that can help you facilitate this to experiment with a referral marketing strategy, especially if you already have a group of customers that are super fans of your products that you have good relationships with. So with a referral marketing strategy, anytime a customer refers a friend, then that customer can get things like cash rewards discounts, coupons, or bonus points as part of like a loyalty program.

So referring friends can get new eyeballs on your brand, have people sign up to your email marketing list that you wouldn’t normally get. It’s kind of like a digital version of Word of mouth. And you’re getting new people excited and interested by leveraging the people who are already excited about your brand. Of course you can try to do a giveaway. giveaways are great if you require someone to enter their email address as part of the giveaway. There are definitely Shopify apps that can help you facilitate this also, there’s one I’ve personally used called King Sumo, where you just set the duration of the giveaway, it kind of handles all the data aspects of it like the GDPR adherence to those guidelines. So a person can just enter their email address, and then maybe perhaps get bonus entries by liking your brand on Instagram, liking you on Facebook, whatever it is that you decide to, to enter there as requirements. And then the giveaway can be whatever makes sense to you, you want to get back the value that you put into it. So maybe it wouldn’t be like a super high priced item. But you’d need to kind of think through the financials of that. another layer of that is maybe doing a cross promotion with another brand that shares your target customers and doing a joint giveaway or a multi brand giveaway, which makes the prize that much more attractive and appealing to prospective customers. So you can have some kind of bundled prize like a piece of jewelry, a small bottle of perfume, a piece of clothing, a beauty item, whatever it is, as long as all of these brands, share the customer that you’re going for. Then all the brands can promote this contest, have email signup as a requirement for someone to enter the giveaway. And then you guys can all share the email addresses which is really nice and You’ll likely get more email signups than if you were to do the giveaway yourself. So that’s another idea. You can definitely Another idea is to give away a lead magnet. So a lead magnet like fancy marketing speak. But it basically means giving something away or using like a dangling a carrot in front of your customers to give away something of value, it doesn’t have to be a piece of jewelry to get an email signup. So an example of a lead magnet might be a downloadable PDF style guide, or something else likes guide to spring trends or something. So you would host that on your website, someone interested in reading that would just enter their email address, and then they would get an automatic email with that download. The better and more appealing and exciting you can make that lead magnet, the more likely someone might be to sign up for your emails, of course, in addition to regular pop ups and opt in forms on your website, you can also try exit intent pop ups, this is something you might want to a b test. Because while it works for some brands, it could be I guess, annoying in some other cases. So an exit intent pop up is a type of pop up that triggers when the app that is like running it, I guess, knows that the customer is about to leave the page. So before the customer actually has a chance to weave, a pop up comes up and says something like, hey, before you go, like maybe here’s 10% off to sweeten the deal or whatever it may be, or,

you know, keep in touch with us so so you can hear about new products moving forward and to your email address. So while a normal pop up kind of triggers when someone first visits a site, an exit intent pop up happens when someone’s about to leave, as like a last chance to capture that person’s attention. You can also leverage the power of content marketing. So I’ve talked about blogging a lot on this podcast, if you’re able to kind of get in a really good rhythm with blogging and your blogs seem to offer value and attract attention. And they are bringing people in from search traffic, you can always put a separate call to action and opt in form on every blog post page, which is great, especially if someone’s entering your site through a blog post. So if that’s their first way that they’re being exposed to your brand, they may not know a ton about your brand, they may not know a ton about your products, they may have like been really interested in that post, you may have kind of captured a first hint of their attention. Now make sure that you can keep in touch with them by putting a specific call to action. An opt in form for email in that blog post. You can also kind of do gated content it’s called so maybe you have like a short version of a blog post something a little more brief. And then make that lead magnet, a longer more expanded version of that blog post that by the time the person gets to the end of the post, if they want more if they want that expanded version, they can enter their email address and it would be automatically sent to them. So that’s combining this like in blog calls action with the lead magnet strategy that I mentioned earlier, you can create a quiz. This is something I actually recently did with a client paired with Facebook and Instagram ads. We did an engagement and wedding ring style quiz, where we asked a series of questions and then it gives product recommendations, which is really helpful when the brand has a large inventory. Or especially if it’s something like bridal wear the styles, the range of styles can be super overwhelming. And a lot of them kind of start to look the same after a while. So if you can use a quiz app, one for Shopify is called quiz kit. They have a free version that you can try out and then a paid one where you have amazing options to design the quiz. Make it look like it’s really part of your website in terms of color and font and photography. You can really customize it out as much as you want. And then choose the product recommendations that you Want to share with your customers, and you have the option to require an email address at the end of that quiz if someone wants to get their results, and it’s, it’s fun, like, Who doesn’t like quizzes, just reminds me of being like 13 years old and reading, like Teen Vogue, or cosmopolitan or whatever. And taking those style quizzes like they don’t have to be super intellectual, I think people sometimes need a little distraction on the internet. And it’s a fun way to engage your customers and get their email addresses. If you are doing any sort of paid social media advertising, like Facebook and Instagram ads, there’s a type of Facebook and Instagram ad that is called lead generation where the goal of it the point, the way the ad is set up is actually to get email addresses. Typically, this would work hand in hand with a lead magnet. So you would have to kind of promise something in exchange for the email address, whether it’s some kind of really exclusive discount, or like a style guide, or whatever it may be. But it’s a way to pair the paid advertising spend with your email capture efforts. You can personally ask your customers for their email addresses. This might seem a little bit obvious, but especially if you have like a smaller following on Instagram, for example, and you already do a lot of engagement on social media. And you’re the type of business that provides a more like personal tailored experience Anyway, why not dm some people that you know that you notice liking and commenting on your posts often, especially if you know that they’re not already members of your email list, and ask them to sign up, tell them specifically like what the benefit is, and simply share the link to that signup form.

And the last tactic for gaining new email subscribers is to do more in person events, which now I think it’s starting to look a little bit brighter through the rest of 2021. Doing in person events, meeting customers in person having like a paper or some kind of iPad situation where you capture email addresses is a really great way to get a lot of email addresses. Because I think especially if a prospective customer likes you at an event, they might be worried that they’ll forget about you later or they won’t know how to get to your website, even if they follow you on social media. So they’ll want you to keep in touch with them. And more especially if you plan to do more events like that in the future in their area. I would segment those customers geographically and have a specific segment of your list for different places that you do events so that you can meet them again in the future. So those are my tips.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Links mentioned at the beginning of this episode:

“I studied the fonts of the top 1000 websites. Here’s what I learned.“

“The world’s largest jewelry brand is ditching mined diamonds“

“Email Marketing Still Leads as a Driver of Sales Revenue“